The Red Mill

The good news is that even the title cards have a wit and humor that is carried over beautifully onto film under Fatty Arbuckle's direction for THE RED MILL, based loosely on a Victor Herbert operetta.

Quaint is a good word to describe the costumes and settings of the Dutch tale, which opens with a charming ice skating sequence that is played for laughs and largely succeeds because of the clever acting of MARION DAVIES and OWEN MOORE. The tale that follows is a case of mistaken identity, with Moore confusing Davies with the burgonmaster's daughter LOUISE FAZENDA, who is engaged in a comical relationship with someone else.

Davies has never been better at establishing herself as a comedienne from the start, given lots of bits of business (on and off the ice), including the stay in a haunted mill that occupies that last fifteen minutes of the story and is a good mixture of laughter and fright.

Technically, the film looks great with TCM's restoration and a bouncy score that accompanies rather than distracts (as some of the new scores do). Very worthwhile Marion Davies vehicle shows that she did indeed have promise as more than Hearst's favorite protégé.

Trivia note: The sets and costumes cry out for early Technicolor but only the night scenes are shaded a blue tint.

Here's the thing.

If you love film, you'll love the experiments in cinematic narrative of "Citizen Kane," but at the same time wonder why he chose Hearst and Davis to pick on. You would think that the choice in subject would be every bit as nuanced, especially as the choice is popularly credited with destroying him in Hollywood.

And that might lead you to some of Marion Davis' films, especially this one directed by a similarly blacklisted Fatty Arbuckle. This is such a gem. Actually, its quite ordinary, but she is so special in it, it will glow forever. It seems that she would have been better off without Hearst's interest in her. She had the stuff.

The climax of this has something of a different flavor than the rest of it, which pretty much follows the formula of the day. It has a pacing that was unusual for the time. Hard to notice today when such things seem like the way the world breathes. But Fatty knew his stuff, and so did Marion. And so did Orson but he actually relied on them.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

This is yet another movie that should be shown to anyone who might doubt the talents of Marion Davies. She is delightful in this performance, with some wonderful bits of physical comedy. Director Fatty Arbuckle surely deserves the credit as well. The supporting players are also quite good, but make no mistake - this is her film.

The saddest thing about The Red Mill is that it never got a sound adaption so the Victor Herbert-Henry Blossom score was never heard. Watching it I was hoping at least to hear some of the songs on the sound track. But there was nary a note of Herbert's heard in the film.

The Red Mill was a vehicle for the famous vaudeville team of Fred Stone and David Montgomery and ran in the 1906-07 season for 274 performances. The score consisted of such Herbert classics as In Old New York and Every Day Is Lady's Day With Me and Moonbeams. Purportedly there was a planned remake of it that was shelved that would have starred Laurel and Hardy. It might have been a great film.

This version has the plot somewhat altered to fit Marion Davies who plays a Dutch barmaid who falls in love with visiting Irishman Owen Moore. It's a good thing that Roscoe Arbuckle directing under the pseudonym William Goodrich was in charge. He saw that Davies got some nice comedy bits at which she was so much better at than some of the heavy dramatics that William Randolph Hearst her patron and paramour saw as her strength.

MGM spent a lot of money designing some great sets including a Dutch mill where Davies spends the climax trying to elude the villain with Moore trying to rescue her. It's similar to the rather outlandish and funny climax in the rollicking film Many Rivers To Cross that starred Robert Taylor and Eleanor Parker with Davies her own worst enemy in the rescue.

The mill itself is very similar to the one in the Frankenstein movies over at Universal. It's quite remarkable even for today.

I'm disappointed in not hearing any Victor Herbert music, but Marion Davies is quite good in this film.

This is a mildly astounding film, made by the finest studio (MGM) in a year (1927) by which time silent feature films were incredible works of art; the timing of the actors, cutting, and overall pacing were pretty much perfect; and all of which had to be thrown out and started all over again with the introduction of sound. This film is doubly astounding when we learn that it was directed by Fatty Arbuckle, some years after he (or at least his name) had been banned from movies. Thus we get a 2-part picture: the first third or so focuses almost exclusively on Marion Davies, giving her patient time to explore and demonstrate her comic abilities; the remainder of the picture is given over to plot, with an increasingly frantic and overall quite imaginative screenplay that is quite fun to follow.

The influence of Buster Keaton (old comic partner of Arbuckle) is clearly in evidence in the opening scene: we start with a picturesque vision of Dutch citizens enjoying ice skating on a frozen canal; we cut to a shot of Marion Davies from the waist up, also apparently skating; but as we pull back, we see she is actually "skating" on two scrub brushes that are attached to her shoes, careening around a soapy floor. Very Keatonesque!

More bizarre is the bewildering variety of incredibly fat males sprinkled throughout the film. This includes children: in a scene with a couple dozen Dutch kids, we are treated to a dizzying array of really roly-poly boys. And the diminutive Ed Snitzer is several times comically contrasted to the Dutch bohemoths around him. I wonder what Fatty was thinking here...

Back to Marion Davies. Now I went through a period in my teens when I was infatuated by the Three Stooges. Now, 30 years later, I am astounded to see a silent female version of Curly Howard, fighting for 5 minutes with an uncooperative ironing board, complete with facial grimaces alternating between frustration and joy. Its proto-Curly! And when Davies tries to solve the problem of an uncooperative cow who keeps whacking her in the face with its tail as she tries to milk it, by tieing a brick to its tail, with the predictable result of the cow whacking her on the head with the brick - well this is a specific gag used by Curly and the Stooges in later films. Now I can't prove who copied who, but the connection from early silent comedy (Arbuckle) through late silent comedy (Davies) to sound slapstick (the Stooges) is fascinating.

The only inexplicable thing here is that the Dutch characters speak (through title cards) in English to each other, but because they don't speak English well, their sentences are quite fractured; thus, for example, one girl speaks of having "dislocated" her boyfriend, when she lost him. Get it? If they were meant to be talking in Dutch, the "translations" would be in proper English.

Overall, a fun and intriguing comedy, and smooth as silk.